Web Masters

Chances are, before you take a vacation, you do lots of research figuring out where to go and what to do when you get there. Today, that's as easy as a Google search, but that wasn't always the case. In the early days of the Web, vacation research required hours of tedious detective work as you pieced together little bits of information about the places you wanted to visit from questionable sources.

That all began to change when Steve Kaufer launched TripAdvisor. His travel review website completely revolutionized the travel industry and changed the way people took vacations.

On this episode of Web Masters, Steve shares the story of not just building TripAdvisor, but running it for two decades through both an acquisition and going public.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

What would the Internet be without pictures and videos of cats doing ridiculous things? Luckily, we'll never have to find out, and it's thanks, in part, to Ben Huh.

In the early 2000s, Ben bought a popular cat meme website called I Can Haz Cheezburger and he turned it into the Cheezburger Network, one of the Internet's most popular user-submitted content websites. In its heyday, the site was so popular it produced everything from coffee table books to reality television shows.

As social media matured, user-submitted content websites waned in popularity, and along with it, so did Cheezburger Network, but not before Ben's sites forever flooded the Internet with thousands of memes that we might never escape.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

For almost as long as people have been communicating on the Web they've been using it to talk about stocks. At the heart of those conversations since the very beginning were the Gardner brothers, David and Tom. Together they launched The Motley Fool.

The Motley Fool began as a small financial newsletter for friends and family, it evolved into one of the most popular forums on AOL, and it's since become one of the most reputable sites for financial advice anywhere on the Web. During the journey it's survived three enormous market crashes and a host of other problems that would kill most startups. But somehow, those problems have only made The Fool stronger and even more popular.

On this episode of Web Masters, join one of the Fool brothers -- David Gardner -- as he shares the story of how he and his sibling have made themselves prominent leaders of financial conversations for three decades.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Is it possible to start a wildly successful company by luck? It is according to Craig Newmark.

As you can probably guess by the name, Craig is the founder of Craigslist, the ultra-popular classifieds website that millions of people have been using for decades to help solve just about any kind of need you could possibly imagine.

But that wasn't the goal behind launching Craigslist. Instead, Craigslist was started as a simple email list to share what was happening in the Bay Area. How did it become a household name and a site for anyone and everyone to buy/sell/trade whatever they wanted? Find out on this episode of Web Masters.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

For millions of people, their first experience with the World Wide Web was made possible by America Online -- AOL. In fact, most people directly associate AOL with the Web. But did you know AOL predates the World Wide Web by nearly a decade?

That's because, when AOL launched, the it was still illegal to use the Internet for commercialize activities. Instead, AOL was one of a handful of companies attempting to create their own global network. And, thanks to a bunch of CD-Roms you probably remember, AOL was the most successful company doing it.

On this episode of Web Masters, you'll hear the story of how AOL got started and how it grew to be one of the biggest companies on the early Web as we hear from AOL co-founder Marc Seriff.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Today, Jason Calacanis is one of the most prominent names in the Silicon Valley tech and entrepreneurship community. But, before he was a well-known West Coast investor, he was at the center of the smaller bust fast-growing East Coast tech scene in New York known as "Silicon Alley."

Jason ran Silicon Alley Reporter, a magazine dedicated to the tech innovation happening in New York City. It grew from a 16 page, homemade, photocopied booklet into a 300+ page glossy generating millions in ad revenue.

On this episode of Web Masters, Jason shares the story of how he created the magazine as well as what entrepreneurial life was like in the early days of New York tech.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

The Kickstarter name is synonymous with crowdfunding. It's like the Kleenex of the crowdfunding industry. But, strangely enough, Kickstarter didn't invent crowdfunding. The technique dates back centuries. Heck, Kickstarter wasn't even the first crowdfunding website. So how did it become the world's de facto crowdfunding platform?

In this episode of Web Masters, we find out by speaking with one of Kickstarter's co-founders, Charles Adler. He shares the story of building the platform and how he and his co-founders turned a goal of helping artists fund their work into a global brand that's become synonymous with launching innovative new projects.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Most of us do a significant chunk of our purchasing at Amazon.com. Or, at the very least, a site like it. Amazon may or may not be the cheapest, but we're pretty sure it'll have what we want, we know delivery will be quick, and the price will be competitive.

Even though we don't give online purchasing a second thought these days, it actually took a lot of years for early web users to get comfortable buying stuff from the internet. That's because E-commerce didn't begin as a better option for most retail purchases. In fact, in the beginning, E-commerce was pretty crummy. It was hard to navigate, shipping times were slow, and there was lots of fraud.

E-commerce had to evolve over time into becoming something that was clearly a better option than traditional, in-person commerce, and one of the people who had a big impact on that evolution was Amir Ashkenazi. He did it by helping people bargain hunt and comparison shop online, first through his DealTime platform, and then the company it became, which was Shopping.com.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

Most digital music pioneers encountered lots of resistance from the large music record labels. In fact, many of their companies were sued out of existence. But not eMusic.

eMusic's founder, Mark Chasan, was one of the few digital music pioneers who actually managed to successfully navigate the early digital music waters, ultimately building an online music business that couldn't be stopped by the music industry and their endless string of lawsuits.

On this episode of Web Masters, we'll hear how Mark did it, as well as the pioneering work he's doing now in a different and, arguably, much more important industry.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.

When Alon Carmel launched JDate in 1997, he wasn't a pioneer in the online dating industry. He wasn't even a pioneer in the online Jewish dating industry. In fact, by the time he had the idea for Jdate, the Web already contained over a hundred Jewish themed dating websites. But rather than seeing all that competition and thinking the market was saturated, Alon saw the competition and figured: "It must be a good business."

Recognizing the opportunity, Alon and his friend, Joe Shapira, focused on creating a popular brand. And it worked.

From lavish parties to billboards across Times Square, Alon wanted to make sure everyone in the world knew about Jdate, even if not everyone was his customer. The result was the world's most popular dating website for Jewish people and a strategy for online dating focused on niche communities that Alon and his team expanded well beyond Jewish dating. It ultimately led to Spark Networks, one of the largest and most profitable networks of dating websites in the world.

For a complete transcript of the episode, click here.